PolicyBytes: The scandal behind those recent unemployment numbers

Published 11:55 am, Thursday, April 11, 2013

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest jobs report on Friday: the economy only added 88,000 jobs in March (a number that could be revised significantly either way in the next two months).

Some people took heart in the fact that the unemployment rate fell from 7.7 percent to 7.6 percent. But even that number is deceptive, both because it too is preliminary and because to be defined as unemployed, someone has to be actively looking for work — and millions of Americans have given up the search.

According to BLS, the labor force declined by 496,000. So even though the economy and population are both growing, the number of people working is declining. And here’s the worst news: 148,000 leaving the workforce in March were black and 282,000 were Hispanic. That’s 430,000, or about 87 percent, of those leaving the workforce because they can’t find a job.

And it isn’t because there aren’t jobs out there. BLS just reported that the number of job openings increased from 3.6 million to 3.9 million in February.

In booming areas of the economy like the technology sector, the unemployment rate is 3 percent to 4 percent. Economists consider that full employment. Indeed, there are thousands of high-paying technology jobs that remain unfilled because companies can’t find qualified workers.

But reforming education, especially for low-income families who can’t easily move to a high-performing school district so that kids are better able to qualify for information-economy jobs, means taking on the teachers’ unions. Don’t look for this White House to take that step.

There are also states where there are lots of blue-collar jobs open to people with limited educational skills: the states where energy production has become a major part of the economy. But the Obama administration has slow-walked, hindered or flat denied most efforts to expand drilling on federal lands (the vast majority of new drilling is currently on private lands, which the feds don’t control).

The result of the administration’s policies is a jobs disaster that doesn’t have to be. And it’s disproportionately affecting minorities, keeping them out of the workforce. It’s an economic scandal; the question is why it isn’t a political scandal?